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Lot Essay
"Initially, a light white smoke, then yellow, elevated itself gently, then small blue and orange flames, mobile and rapid, reddened all over. The characters became motionless, impassive, slowly surrounded by the flames, then enveloped, reduced in their immobility, similar to those shrubs that surprise and make one exclaim; 'Look, look you'd think they're humans'" (Leonor Fini, cited in exh. cat. Leonor Fini, Comune di Ferrara, Galeria Civica d'Arte Moderna, Palazzo dei Diamanti, 1983, p. 19).
In L'enroulement du silence (The Envelopment of Silence) Leonor Fini, whom Jean Cocteau once described as being surrealist in spite of herself, has recounted a spectacle she would like to see again. As in a drama, she has set her scene on a dark, lugubrious stage where all the elements seem real and palpable. The scene depicted could be the beginning of the play but is most probably the end, as the shaven head with its shiny skull is the "sign of the most terrible malediction, and sign of interior domains, where those of us who still maintain physical ornamentation no longer have a right to look" (Jean Genet, lettre à Leonor Fini, 1950). We are forced to leave the theatre, the terrestrial world as we know it, if not physically at least consciously.
The explanation of the spectacle Fini wishes to see once more, takes us further into the interpretation of "Enveloped by Silence" and into an important trait of Fini's oeuvre. Human, mineral, animal and vegetable worlds are intertwined, mixed, mutated. In the spectacle the characters become shrubs that seem human. L'enroulement du silence - a work from Fini's dark period of the mid 1950s, at first seems to the viewer to contain recognisable forms until these begin a process of natural metamorphosis.
The gardienne, as Fini would baptise these heretical women with shaven heads, covers her eyes and ears - an act that leads to absolute numbness, silence, and lastly illumination of the soul through the skull. She sits enveloped by her large, thick cape. But the more one looks, the more the clarity of the image begins to dissolve. Is that a cape or a tree trunk standing rooted on the ground? Is it a set of wings, for the butterfly in her cocoon or the shell of a mollusc? The hands have palms too short and fingers too long to be human and the head seems to be more an egg, with its smooth, shiny oval surface. The egg, the device of female life, forms the fragile apex of a volcano that Jean Genet described as "moving in an element so sensitive, that any shock, if it were felt, would take the proportions of a storm" (Jean Genet, lettre à Leonor Fini, 1950) and this 'storm' would be the end of silence.
In L'enroulement du silence (The Envelopment of Silence) Leonor Fini, whom Jean Cocteau once described as being surrealist in spite of herself, has recounted a spectacle she would like to see again. As in a drama, she has set her scene on a dark, lugubrious stage where all the elements seem real and palpable. The scene depicted could be the beginning of the play but is most probably the end, as the shaven head with its shiny skull is the "sign of the most terrible malediction, and sign of interior domains, where those of us who still maintain physical ornamentation no longer have a right to look" (Jean Genet, lettre à Leonor Fini, 1950). We are forced to leave the theatre, the terrestrial world as we know it, if not physically at least consciously.
The explanation of the spectacle Fini wishes to see once more, takes us further into the interpretation of "Enveloped by Silence" and into an important trait of Fini's oeuvre. Human, mineral, animal and vegetable worlds are intertwined, mixed, mutated. In the spectacle the characters become shrubs that seem human. L'enroulement du silence - a work from Fini's dark period of the mid 1950s, at first seems to the viewer to contain recognisable forms until these begin a process of natural metamorphosis.
The gardienne, as Fini would baptise these heretical women with shaven heads, covers her eyes and ears - an act that leads to absolute numbness, silence, and lastly illumination of the soul through the skull. She sits enveloped by her large, thick cape. But the more one looks, the more the clarity of the image begins to dissolve. Is that a cape or a tree trunk standing rooted on the ground? Is it a set of wings, for the butterfly in her cocoon or the shell of a mollusc? The hands have palms too short and fingers too long to be human and the head seems to be more an egg, with its smooth, shiny oval surface. The egg, the device of female life, forms the fragile apex of a volcano that Jean Genet described as "moving in an element so sensitive, that any shock, if it were felt, would take the proportions of a storm" (Jean Genet, lettre à Leonor Fini, 1950) and this 'storm' would be the end of silence.